‘Which proves nothing.’
She passed him the compad, her entourage of seahorses and fish scattering like fireflies. ‘No, but it certainly looks suspicious. Why would the alpha vanish around the time you went to meet the Shrouders, unless the two events were related?’
‘You’re saying I had something to do with it?’
‘The subsequent data-movements could only have been faked by someone within the Sylveste organisation. You’re the obvious suspect.’
‘A motive wouldn’t go amiss.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ she said, returning the compad to her lap. ‘I’m sure I’ll think of one.’
Three days after the janitor-rat had warned her of the crew’s awakening, Volyova felt sufficiently prepared to meet them. It was never something she particularly looked forward to, for although she did not actively dislike human company, neither had Volyova ever had any difficulty in adjusting to solitude. But things were worse now. Nagorny was dead, and by now the others would be well aware of that fact.
Ignoring the rats, and subtracting Nagorny, the ship now carried six crew members. Five, if one elected not to include the Captain. And why include him, when — as far as the other crew were aware, he was not even capable of consciousness, let alone communication? They carried him only because they hoped to make him well. In all other respects the ship’s real centre of power was vested in the Triumvirate. That was Yuuji Sajaki, Abdul Hegazi and — of course — herself. Below the Triumvirate there were currently two more crew, of equal rank. Their names were Kjarval and Sudjic; chimerics who had only recently joined ship. Finally — the lowest rank of all — was the Gunnery Officer, the role Nagorny had filled. Now that he was dead the role had a certain potentiality, like a vacant throne.
During their periods of activity , the other crew tended to stay within certain well-defined districts of the ship, leaving the rest to Volyova and her machines. It was morning now, by shiptime: here up in the crew levels, the lights still followed a diurnal pattern, slaved to a twenty-four hour clock. She went first to the reefersleep room and found it empty, with all but one of the sleep caskets open. The other one, of course, belonged to Nagorny. After reattaching his head Volyova had placed the body in the casket and cooled it down. Later, she had arranged for the unit to malfunction, allowing Nagorny to warm. He had been dead already, but it would take a skilled pathologist to tell that now. Clearly none of the crew had felt much inclined to examine him closely.
She thought about Sudjic again. Sudjic and Nagorny had been close, for a while. It would not pay to underestimate Sudjic.
Volyova left the reefersleep chamber, explored several other likely places of meeting, and then found herself entering one of the forests, navigating through immense thickets of dead vegetation until she neared a pocket where UV lamps were still burning. She approached a glade, making her way unsteadily down the rustic wooden stairs which led to the floor. The glade was quite idyllic — more so now that the rest of the forest was so bereft of life. Shafts of yellow sunlight knifed through a shifting bower of palm trees overhead. There was a waterfall in the distance, feeding a steep-walled lagoon. Parrots and macaws occasionally kited from tree to tree or made ratcheting calls from their perches.
Volyova gritted her teeth, despising the artificiality of the place.
The four living crew were eating breakfast around a long wooden table, piled high with bread, fruit, slices of meat and cheese, jars of orange juice and flasks of coffee. Across the glade, two holographically projected jousting knights were doing their best to disembowel each other.
‘Good morning,’ she said, stepping from the staircase onto the authentically dewy grass. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any coffee left?’
They looked up, some of them twisting around on their stools to meet her. She registered their reactions as their cutlery clinked discreetly down, three of them murmuring a hushed greeting. Sudjic said nothing at all, while only Sajaki actually raised his voice.
‘Glad to see you, Ilia.’ He snatched a bowl from the table. ‘Care for some grapefruit?’
‘Thanks. Perhaps I will.’
She walked towards them and took the plate from Sajaki, the fruit glistening with sugar. Deliberately she sat between the two other women: Sudjic and Kjarval. Both were currently black-skinned and bald, apart from fiery tangles of dreadlocks erupting from their crowns. Dreadlocks were important to Ultras: they symbolised the number of reefersleep stints that each had done; the number of times each had almost kissed the speed of light. The two women had joined after their own ship had been pirated by Volyova’s crew. Ultras traded loyalties as easily as the water ice, monopoles and data they used for currency. Both were overt chimerics, although their transformations were modest compared to Hegazi. Sudjic’s arms vanished below her elbows into elaborately engraved bronze gauntlets, inlaid with ormoluwork windows which revealed constantly shifting holographics, diamond nails projecting from the too-slender fingers of her mock hands. Most of Kjarval’s body was organic, but her eyes were feline cross-hatched red ellipses, and her flat nose exhibited no nostrils; merely sleekly rilled apertures, as if she was partially adapted to aquatic living. She wore no clothes, but apart from eyes, nostrils, mouth and ears, her skin was seamless, like an all-enveloping sheath of ebony neoprene. Her breasts lacked nipples; her fingers were dainty but without nails, and her toes were little more than vague suggestions, as if she had been rendered by a sculptor anxious to begin another commission. As Volyova sat down, Kjarval observed her with indifference that was a little too studied to be genuine.
‘It’s good to have you with us,’ Sajaki said. ‘You’ve been very busy while we were sleeping. Anything much happen?’
‘This and that.’
‘Intriguing.’ Sajaki smiled. ‘This and that. I don’t suppose that between “this” and “that” you noticed anything which might shed some light on Nagorny’s death?’
‘I wondered where Nagorny was. Now you’ve answered my question.’
‘But you haven’t answered mine.’
Volyova dug into her grapefruit. ‘The last time I saw him he was alive. I have no idea… how did he die, incidentally?’
‘His reefersleep unit warmed him prematurely. Various bacteriological processes ensued. I don’t suppose we need to go into the details, do we?’
‘Not over breakfast, no.’ Evidently they had not examined him closely at all: if they had, they might have noticed the injuries he had sustained during his death, for all that she had tried to disguise them. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, flashing a glance towards Sudjic. ‘I meant no disrespect.’
‘Of course not,’ Sajaki said, tearing a hunk of bread in half. He fixed Sudjic with his close-set ellipsoidal eyes, like someone staring down a rabid dog. The tattoos which he had applied during his infiltration of the Bloater Skyjacks were gone now, but there were fine whitish trails where they had been, despite the patient ministrations which had been visited upon him in reefersleep. Perhaps, Volyova thought, Sajaki had instructed his medichines to retain some trace of his exploits among the Bloaterians; a trophy of the economic gains he had wrested from them. ‘I’m sure we all absolve Ilia of any responsibility for Nagorny’s death — don’t we, Sudjic?’
‘Why should I blame her for an accident?’ Sudjic said.
‘Precisely. And there’s an end to the matter.’
‘Not quite,’ Volyova said. ‘Now may not be the best time to raise the matter, but…’ She trailed off. ‘I was going to say that I wanted to extract the implants from his head. But even if I was allowed to do so, they’d probably be damaged.’
‘Can you make new ones?’ Sajaki asked.
‘Given time, yes.’ She said it with a sigh of resignation. ‘I’ll need a new candidate, too.’
‘When we lay over around Yellowstone,’ Hegazi said, ‘you can search for someone there, can’t you?’
The knights were still clashing across the glade, but no one was paying them very much atten
tion now, even though one of them seemed to be having difficulties with an arrow inserted through his faceplate.
‘I’m sure someone suitable will turn up,’ Volyova said.
The cold air in the Mademoiselle’s house was the cleanest Khouri had tasted since arriving on Yellowstone. Which was really saying very little. Clean, but not fragrant. More like the smells she remembered from the hospital tent on Sky’s Edge, redolent of iodine and cabbage and chlorine, the last time she had seen Fazil.
Manoukhian’s cable-car had carried them across the city, through a partially flooded subsurface aqueduct. They had arrived in an underground cavern. From there, Manoukhian had ushered Khouri into a lift which ascended with ear-popping speed. The lift had brought them to this dark, echoey hallway. More than likely it was just a trick of acoustics, but Khouri felt as if she had just stepped into a huge unlit mausoleum. Filigreed windows floated overhead, but the light which leaked through them was midnight pale. Given that it was still day outside, the effect was subtly disturbing.
‘The Mademoiselle has no passion for daylight,’ Manoukhian said, leading her on.
‘You don’t say.’ Khouri’s eyes were starting to adjust to the gloom. She began to pick out big hulking things standing in the hall. ‘You’re not from around here, are you, Manoukhian?’
‘I guess that makes two of us.’
‘Was it a clerical error that brought you to Yellowstone as well?’
‘Not quite.’ She could tell that Manoukhian was deciding how much he could get away with telling. That was his one weakness, Khouri thought. For a hit-man, or whatever he was, the man liked to talk too much. The trip over had been one long series of brags and boasts about his exploits in Chasm City — stuff, which, if it had been coming from anyone other than this cool customer with the foreign accent and trick gun, she would have dismissed out of hand. But with Manoukhian, the worrying thing was that a lot of it might have been true. ‘No,’ he said, his urge to spin a story obviously triumphing over his professional instincts towards surliness. ‘No; it wasn’t a clerical error. But it was a kind of mistake — or an accident, at any rate.’
There were lots of the hulking things. It was difficult to make out their overall shapes, but they all rested on slim poles jutting from black plinths. Some were like sections of smashed eggshell, while others more resembled delicate husks of brain coral. Everything had a metallic sheen, rendered colourless in the sallow light of the hallway.
‘You had an accident?’
‘No… not me. She did. The Mademoiselle. That’s how we met each other. She was… I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, Khouri. She finds out, I’m dead meat. Pretty easy to dispose of bodies in the Mulch. Hey, you know what I found there the other day? You’re not going to believe any of this, but I found a whole fucking…’
Manoukhian went off on a boast. Khouri brushed her fingers against one of the sculptures, feeling its cool metal texture. The edges were very sharp. It was as if she and Manoukhian were two furtive art lovers who had broken into a museum in the middle of the night. The sculptures seemed to be biding their time. They were waiting for something — but not with infinite reserves of patience.
She was perplexingly glad of the gunman’s company.
‘Did she make these?’ Khouri asked, interrupting Manoukhian’s flow.
‘Perhaps,’ Manoukhian said. ‘In which case you could say she suffered for her art.’ He stopped, touching her on the shoulder. ‘All right. You see those stairs?’
‘I guess you want me to use them.’
‘You’re learning.’
Gently, he stuck the gun in her back — just to remind her it was still there.
Through a porthole in the wall next to the dead man’s quarters Volyova could see a tangerine-coloured gas giant planet, its shadowed southern pole flickering with auroral storms. They were deep inside the Epsilon Eridani system now; coming in at a shallow angle to the ecliptic. Yellowstone was only a few days away; already they were within light-minutes of local traffic, threading through the web of line-of-sight communications which linked every significant habitat or spacecraft in the system. Their own ship had changed, too. Through the same window Volyova could just see the front of one of the Conjoiner engines. The engines had automatically hauled in their scoop fields as the ship dropped below ramming speed, subtly altering their shapes to in-system mode, the intake maw closing like a flower at dusk. Somehow the engines were still producing thrust, but the source of the reaction mass or the energy to accelerate it was just another mystery of Conjoiner technology. Presumably there was a limit on how long the drives could function like this, or else they would never have needed to trawl space for fuel during interstellar cruise mode…
Her mind was wandering, trying to focus on anything but the issue at hand.
‘I think she’s going to be trouble,’ Volyova said. ‘Serious trouble.’
‘Not if I read her correctly.’ Triumvir Sajaki dispensed a smile. ‘Sudjic knows me too well. She knows I wouldn’t take the trouble of actually reprimanding her if she made a move against a member of the Triumvirate. I wouldn’t even give her the luxury of leaving the ship when we get to Yellowstone. I’d simply kill her.’
‘That might be a little harsh.’
She sounded weak and despised herself for it, but it was how she felt. ‘It’s not as if I don’t sympathise with her. After all Sudjic had nothing personal against me until I… until Nagorny died. If she does anything, couldn’t you just discipline her?’
‘It’s not worth it,’ Sajaki said. ‘If she has the mind to do something to you, she won’t stop at petty aggravation. If I just discipline her she’ll find a way to hurt you permanently. Killing her would be the only reasonable option. Anyway — I’m surprised that you see her side of things. Hasn’t it occurred to you that some of Nagorny’s problems might have rubbed off on her?’
‘You’re asking me whether I think she’s completely sane?’
‘It doesn’t matter. She won’t move against you — you have my word on that.’ Sajaki paused. ‘Now, can we get this over with? I’ve had enough of Nagorny for one life.’
‘I know exactly how you feel.’
It was several days after her first meeting with the crew. They were standing outside the dead man’s quarters, on level 821, preparing to enter his rooms. They had remained sealed since his death — longer, as far as the others were concerned. Even Volyova had not entered them, wary of disturbing something which might place her there.
She spoke into her bracelet. ‘Disable security interdict, personal quarters Gunnery Officer Boris Nagorny, authorisation Volyova.’
The door opened before them, emitting a palpable draught of highly chilled air.
‘Send them in,’ Sajaki said.
The armed servitors took only a few minutes to sweep the interior, certifying that there were no obvious hazards. It would have been unlikely, of course, since Nagorny had probably not planned to die quite when Volyova had arranged it. But with characters like him, one could never be sure.
They stepped in, the servitors having already activated the room lights.
Like most of the psychopaths she had encountered, Nagorny had always seemed perfectly happy with the smallest of personal spaces. His quarters were even more determinedly cramped than her own. A fastidious neatness had been at work there, like a poltergeist in reverse. Most of his belongings — there were not many — had been securely racked down, and so had not been disturbed by the ship’s manoeuvres when she killed him.
Sajaki grimaced and held a sleeve up to his nose. ‘That smell.’
‘It’s borscht. Beetroot. I think Nagorny was partial to it.’
‘Remind me not to try it.’
Sajaki closed the door behind them.
There was a residual frigidity to the air. The thermometers said that it was now room temperature, but it seemed as if the molecules in the air carried an imprint of the months of cold. The room’s overpowering spartanness did no
t offset this chill. Volyova’s quarters seemed opulent and luxurious by comparison. It was not simply a case of Nagorny neglecting to personalise his space. It was just that in so doing he had so miserably failed by normal standards that his efforts actually contradicted themselves and made the room seem even bleaker than had it been empty.
What failed to help matters was the coffin.
The elongated object had been the only thing in the room not lashed down when she killed Nagorny. It was still intact, but Volyova sensed that the thing had once stood upright, dominating the room with a fearful premonitory grandeur. It was huge and probably made of iron. The metal was as ebon and light-sucking as the surface of a Shrouder emboitement. All its surfaces had been carved in bas-relief, too intricately rendered to give up all their secrets in one glance. Volyova stared in silence. Are you trying to say, she thought, that Boris Nagorny was capable of this?
‘Yuuji,’ she said. ‘I don’t like this at all.’
‘I don’t very much blame you.’
‘What kind of madman makes his own coffin?’
‘A very dedicated one, I’d say. But it’s here, and it’s probably the only glimpse into his mind we have. What do you make of the embellishments?’
‘Undoubtedly a projection of his psychosis, a concretisation.’ Now that Sajaki was forcing calm she was slipping into subservience. ‘I should study the imagery. It might give me insight.’ She paused, added: ‘So that we don’t make the same mistake twice, I mean.’
‘Prudent,’ Sajaki said, kneeling down. He stroked his gloved forefinger over the intagliated rococo surface. ‘We were very lucky you were not forced to kill him, in the end.’
‘Yes,’ she said, giving him an odd look. ‘But what are your thoughts on the embellishments, Yuuji-san?’
‘I’d like to know who or what Sun Stealer was,’ he said, drawing her attention to those words, etched in Cyrillic on the coffin. ‘Does that mean anything to you? Within the terms of his psychosis, I mean. What did it mean to Nagorny?’